Human intelligence and knowledge is becoming increasingly digitized. Not only is information and data generated and created digitized form, frequently, knowledge, information, and other forms of intellectual content are increasingly distributed, disseminated, collected, shared, and/or edited in digitized form.
Traditional formats of knowledge dissemination via books and magazines continue albeit various efforts exist to create digital formats of existing books and magazines that are accessible via the Internet through channels such as online libraries with public or restricted (e.g., subscription-based access). Furthermore, scientific publications and research journals are becoming predominantly accessed by scholars and researchers via online channels since they are typically available sooner than their hardcopy counterparts. Online dictionaries, encyclopedias, wikis (e.g., Wikipedia), have become an integral source of many formal and informal education processes.
In addition, due to ease of digital communication and dialogue to facilitate information exchange, intellectual content is being created in forms logged in formats such as through email text, instant messaging, RSS, portable devices (e.g., SMS and email), digital images, videos, and/or web-based social networks, etc. The wide-array of formats in which intellect is being distributed among has made knowledge management and collection a daunting task in the digital age.
For example, with the vast-array of digitized intellectual content distributed among various sources and formats, searching for the relevant information has become difficult. Web-based search engines that focus on keyword matches for various document fields such as author, abstract, key-topics, full-text sometimes do not yield the most relevant search results to the user. In other situations, a keyword which is relevant to content of a specific topic, simply is not explicitly documented in an article.
Further, managing ones knowledge collection via creating files and folders in ones desktop operating system no longer suffices the need to efficiently manage ones collection of content and for the user to effectively identify/locate the content of relevancy.